1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a management apparatus which manages a plurality of image forming apparatuses connected to a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-310468 discusses a print log management server which manages monitoring servers and printers arranged on a network. More specifically, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-310468, when the configuration of the monitoring server is changed, the print log management server displays a monitoring list screen of monitoring servers “a” and “b” for monitoring a plurality of printers “a” to “n” belonging to groups “A” and “B”. The screen displays information based on a print log of printers to be monitored by the monitoring servers “a” and “b”. Based on the display, settings for the printers to be monitored by the monitoring servers “a” and “b” are performed.
In an actual operation, however, when performing department management based on operation information of a plurality of image forming apparatuses including a department management function, an identical department ID may be registered in the plurality of image forming apparatuses to allow a user to use the plurality of image forming apparatuses. The image forming apparatuses include printers, copying machines, and multifunction peripherals. The operation information includes counter information such as the number of printed sheets and the number of printed sides which are counted up each time printing is performed.
Therefore, a management apparatus for remotely tallying up department counter information for each department ID is capable of tally processing such as calculating a total of department counter information of each department by using the department counter information collected from the plurality of image forming apparatuses. An amount of data of the department counter information increases as a number of departments registered in the image forming apparatuses increases. A transmission schedule for transmitting the department counter from each image forming apparatus is set to once or twice a day to avoid concentration of network load and prevent the department counter information from being frequently transmitted.
However, if a department counter transmission schedule is set in a distributed way to some extent, a processing problem arises in the management apparatus pertaining to tallying and displaying the department counter information. For example, it is assumed that the management apparatus manages 10 image forming apparatuses having the transmission schedule in the morning (5:00 a.m.) and 15 image forming apparatuses having the transmission schedule in the night (11:00 p.m.).
When a tally of the department counter information is checked on the management apparatus in the daytime (1:30 p.m.) of a certain day, the screen displays a tallied result of the department counter information about the 10 image forming apparatuses collected in the morning of the day and the department counter information about the 15 image forming apparatuses collected in the night of the previous day. When a specific day is set as a deadline date for billing processing based on the department counter information, the department counter information of each image forming apparatus at the same time as the deadline date will not be reflected in the tallied result according to the set schedule.
As possible measures for coping with this problem, an identical schedule may be set to all image forming apparatuses. However, if the identical schedule is simply set to all apparatuses, in the case of a user who uses a lot of image forming apparatuses, such as a major corporation, a significantly large number of apparatuses (e.g., one hundred apparatuses or more) will be scheduled for transmission at the same time.
Since use conditions of the image forming apparatus may be changed according to a user operation, it is necessary to suitably review the schedule to attain optimum scheduling in the operation.